Storage cleanup best practices

Sometimes you may find yourself approaching your Storage plan limits.In such circumstances, you can choose to either upgrade to a plan which better suits your requirements, or free up some storage space in your account.

Below are some tips on how you can more optimally manage your account storage, in order to keep it within plan limits and, in some cases, avoid unnecessary upgrades.

Store reasonably sized images: Don't waste storage space on unnecessarily large original images. Cloudinary allows you to apply an incoming transformation to limit the size of the stored resources when uploading your content so that you don't have to pre-generate any scaled-down images before uploading.For already uploaded resources, you can re-upload the file with a reduced storage size, for example by using the limitcrop method.

Store optimal image formats: Use "low weight" formats such as JPG or FLIF/WEBP when images contain transparency rather than "heavy" PNG files etc.

Clearing old images or transformations: You can delete original or derived images older than a predefined period of time from your account dashboard. Alternatively, you can write a short script which uses the Admin API for deleting the resources. Applying this process every once in awhile will make sure you're not wasting your storage on old and unused/unwatched content.

Fetch expiry policy: If 'fetching' is a common use-case on your account then we can set up an expiry policy for your fetched content. With a Fetch Expiry Policy, every fetched resource will have a life-cycle after which it's either refreshed or removed from your account (the interval and the action can be determined by you).Since this requires manual setup on our end, it's currently only available under paid plans.

Storage plan: There are some rather rare cases where a storage-centric plan may be useful. These plans switch between the Storage and Bandwidth quotas, while the price isn't affected at all. Contact us to make this change.

Refresh Backup: Clear old backup (old revisions and removed content) and initiate a new one to free up some unnecessarily used space. This is irrelevant when the backup is managed on a private S3 bucket.

Avoid duplications: Use Cloudinary's capabilities to determine the identity/similarity of an uploaded image to the existing ones on your account.More information is available here: https://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/articles/207441825-How-can-Cloudinary-help-me-to-avoid-duplications-on-my-account-

It's on our roadmap to support more criteria for resources deletion, as well as other helpful mechanisms and automations.